How a Motorcycle Crash Led to 6.5 Million Theraguns Sold

0:00People are going to line up to give you money if you have a great idea. I know that from experience. Dr. Jason Wersland's story started with an injury and turned into a global phenomenon, selling over six and a half million Theraguns and becoming the number one brand in the category. You don't get to walk into Real Madrid's training room if you're not legit. Behind each viral product launch, celebrity partnerships, and staggering numbers are real sacrifices and relentless resilience. We're integrating science and protocols into something that really helps people. Man, I'm starting to get emotional when I think about it because it's like, that's our goal.

0:36Today, we're pulling back the curtain on the mental game, lessons learned, and what it really takes to lead a category to finding company. Jason, Dr. J. Hi. As they say in the biz, thank you for being here. Thanks. I want to go back in time. At the root of Therabody is a very personal story for you. Can you tell me a little bit about the accident in 2007 that sparked this whole thing? I lived in Venice at the time, and my school was in Hollywood. And so every morning— It's your chiropractic school. Chiropractic school, yeah. And every morning I would get up and zip up the 10 and the 110 and then the 101 and get over to my school over in Hollywood.

1:13And this morning it was cold, and I typically wasn't, but it was an October morning in L.A. Went out to my bike, started my bike, and I realized, like, it feels a little cold. I never wear my Kevlar gloves or my jacket or anything because it's always so hot. But that morning, it was chilly. And I only tell this to you because it's these little details that were so important at the time. But I didn't wear them because I had to get off my bike and go do things. And I'd have to take everything off and put it in a bag and then carry the bag with me and my helmet. And it was just too much. Right? So I'm like, should I?

1:51Yeah, it's cold. I don't want to be freezing. So I went in and grabbed it, put it all on, and took off on my bike. And I was splitting traffic. Right with the 10 and the 110 split. And a delivery truck was kind of hiding stuff in front of me. And they let a car through, and it just came out of nowhere. And I T-boned the side of this Volkswagen going about 50 miles an hour, 55 miles an hour. and I had a you know I woke up on the freeway it's unconscious and I realized I was unconscious I kind of started coming to and I just instinctively sat up and grabbed my helmet and it's kind of like to grab my head and I could feel my helmet was broken and I was like oh wow I must have hit something really hard stood up and kind of looked around I cut my arm open and it was bleeding I could feel it in the jacket and the blood running into my hands and I got up and pushed my bike off the side and the ambulance came.

2:44It was just, it was, you know, like typical. I didn't have insurance. Oh no. And when the ambulance pulled up, I was like, I'm not getting in that ambulance. So I talked to the tow truck driver into giving me a ride to school because it was on the way. But as we started driving, he radios ahead to dispatch and says, I have this, the driver in my car. And they're like, get him out of the car. It's illegal for him to be there. And so they, he dumps me out on figure O on ninth. And I had to get to school for a test. I ran to the nearest hotel. I had$84 in my account and I pulled out 20 from the ATM thinking that that would get me to school in a taxi.

3:25So I jump in this taxi, get on the 110, anyone that knows the 110 and where it turns into 101, it's just like we're crawling and I'm watching this, the timer tick, you know, like it's going up and up and we're get just to my off ramp, which is Vermont and the one-on-one and it clicks to 20. And I said, excuse me, sir. I, all I have is a 20. He's like, get out of my car. Somebody's kicked me out of the car. So I had to walk all the way around. I ended up jumping a fence to get to my school. It was a whole thing. Anyway, I ended up having to get stitches in my arm that day. And I had a nine millimeter disc bulge in my neck from hitting that car.

4:04And that's really what triggered all of this that we're here for. Thank you for taking us into the texture of that story, because it really does paint a picture. And also the irony of you being in school to be a chiropractor, a healthcare professional, but then you not seeking medical care is like, there's something poetic in that. Yeah. This kicked off a long journey of recovery and debilitating pain for you. How did you start tinkering around with putting something together, some kind of mechanism that could potentially help you? Shortly after that. So my accident was in October of 2007. And by December of that year, the inflammation and everything had gotten so bad.

4:53I was actually flying back from Utah. the first week of January after having been in Utah with my family and my kids and stuff. And my brother's a chiropractor, so I got treated every day. And I was really trying to be careful with it and stuff. But I fell asleep on the airplane coming back from Utah in early January. And I had my head dropped when I fell asleep. The plane landed and it woke me up. And I started to sit up and it was like someone was stabbing me in the neck. I couldn't even move. I started sweating and everyone had to get off the airplane and they brought the wheelchair in and put me in those like wheelchairs.

5:31I somehow got home and I realized that I was a patient and I'd never been a patient, but I treated a lot of patients. So suddenly I realized like from a patient's perspective, wow, this is real. Like I'm, what am I gonna do? So, you know, you talked about, denying healthcare at the ambulance. But I started thinking like, who can I call? Where can I go? What would I do? That sort of triggered this idea of like, wait a minute, I'm dependent on someone else's time to treat me, but I know what I need. So why do I have to wait for someone? And that didn't make sense to me. And so I just sat with that for a while.

6:18I'm like, so you're telling me I'm just going to go home and sit at my house and ice it? Like what? Let's not, and I knew what I needed. I needed warmth. I needed a massage. I needed something to just soothe the muscles. So I'm sitting in my practice one day, waiting for my business partner, my chiropractor buddy to treat me. And I'm sitting next to a vibrating table. I'm in an extra room waiting for him. And we had a vibrating table where we do traction on the table. Vibration makes your body relax, basically. So you can't splint or guard. So you put someone in, you're gonna do traction on their low back or their neck.

6:51and you flip the switch on and it starts to vibrate and they relax and the machine senses that and it does what it does. So as I'm looking at the table, I was like, I wonder if that'll help my shoulder. So I just reached down and flipped it on and I rested my arm on the table and the pain went away. And I was like, oh, I mean, even talking about right now, I almost get goosebumps because it was like, it went away. And I'm like, oh, 30 seconds later, it came back. And I was like, wait a minute, how did I do that? So we have a thing called accommodation. You have earrings and a ring and stuff. Our body's not aware of those things because they're not important.

7:29They're not threatening. And you and I are talking right now. So your nervous system is really focused on what we're doing. It's not focused on those other things. That's called accommodation. And I knew that. I knew what that was. So I realized, oh, I'm accommodating to this. How can I not accommodate to that? So that was the answer. You said, what made me start tinkering? That was it. How can I find something that my body cannot accommodate to so that it distracts the pain? Pain travels to the brain at about 50 miles an hour. And when I put something on my skin, hot, cold, pokey, texture, whatever, that information travels to my brain at almost 300 miles an hour.

8:09It's called the pain gate theory. So I, all of these things are now starting to come to me and I'm thinking, wait, I need something to take care of myself. So I was sitting in my house one morning and three o 'clock in the morning. And I was like trying to solve this problem. Vibration never leaves the body. It stays connected to the body. And so I'm thinking, well, how can I have something like come off and on the body? And I was like, oh, I can make something. So I just went to the garage and I grabbed a jigsaw and I brought it in. I sat down and I made the first there again and I figured it out.

8:40What was that first version made of? It was a Makita jigsaw. I still have a photo of it. I can show you. I took a long blade and I kind of rolled the blade up with the pliers. I wrapped it with a dish towel and then I wrapped the dish towel with some electrical tape. That's all I had. And I just tested it out and it was amazing. So I just kept doing it. And as long as I had it on my body, I thought I'd have to have it near the pain, but then understanding the nervous system and stuff, I could have it anywhere. And the fact that it was electrical tape and it was kind of sharp edges, it wasn't smooth, that was hitting my skin.

9:18And it was stimulating my nervous system in a way that it was taking the pain away. And I never accommodated. So I'm like, how has no one thought of this? This is amazing. I still remember thinking, I can't be the first one that thought of this. And sure enough, when I started asking around, people didn't know what it was. And so I made that first one. And I think probably the next most important thing about that is I got myself better. I had a goal to get myself better. And I knew what this thing did. And I kept myself, this is part of our brand as well, is I kept myself out of pain between my treatments so that when I was getting treated, we were treating the injury.

9:59We weren't treating pain. A lot of times you're after the pain, you chase the pain, but you're not actually helping the body heal. So that was the process that I went through. You solve this problem that is fueled by a deep personal need. You're also a healthcare professional yourself. You're a chiropractor. Do you immediately think to yourself, oh, I got to start using this modality on my patients? Great question. No, I didn't. Because I thought, this is a Makita jigsaw. I'm a chiropractor. That's already kind of weird. So if I'm like, hey, come in here. I'm going to pull this Makita out and use it on you.

10:37I thought, I'll find something like this. There has to be something in the market and I'll just buy one of those and I'll use that on my patients. But as I was asking around different medical sales reps, different people in the business, and they had no idea what I was talking about. So that's when I started thinking like, wait a minute, patient came in one day, my secretary handed me his paperwork and I was going through his paperwork. And it was the first time that I'd run into someone who was so similar to my situation that I really started feeling for this guy. And I thought, man, do I want to bring that in?

11:13And I was like, okay, I can't wait anymore. Like I got to show this. So I had him come back the next day. We took his x-rays and everything. I had him come back the next day. And I sat him down and I turned this thing on and I showed him what it did. And he just melted. and I remember feeling that way I said dude listen I'm gonna I'm gonna show you how to use this because there's no way I'm gonna get you better in 12 visits which is what his insurance would allow for but I think I can keep you out of pain so that when you do come back we can actually really do some make some progress on on healing your injury because he had this similar thing he was a bus driver and did a head-on bus collision and went into the other bus and it was a mess So that was the first time that I actually used it on someone else.

11:57I never let him take it. I didn't want to have it in my practice. And at the end of his care, we had a moment. And you get close to patients. He just challenged me. He's like, I know you've been wondering what to do with this, but you need to take this. You need to figure this out because it saved our lives. Was that the moment for you that you realized, okay, this is not just a personal cure. This is not just a modality that I might use in my own practice. this is a business? Not a business. That's a great question. I didn't see it as a business. I saw it as a journey. Like I realized like, oh, I got to figure this out.

12:36And I didn't even know how to talk about it yet. Like I didn't know what it was doing. I wasn't able to describe scientifically and technically what it was doing. You just knew that it worked. I just knew that it worked. And I was, when he said I have to figure it out, I was like, okay, I got to figure this out. And so the first few steps was, what's it doing? You know, why is it working the way it works on the nervous system? And once I got that piece, then I was like, okay, now I got to make something that I can deliver that with that doesn't look like a Makita jigsaw, you know? What is a Makita jigsaw?

13:09It's a, Makita is a brand. It's like DeWalt or, you know, Snap-on or just a tool brand. And it's a jigsaw. Like it, you know, has a blade and dials and - So it looked terrifying. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just what I had and ended up being that's the piece. That's the tool I used. You realize that there are some legs to this thing. You dig into the understanding of what it's doing for your nervous system. We'll talk more about the nervous system a little bit later. My favorite topic of all time. But what happens next? Like, you know, now it's like a sort of legendary story of you making these inroads with these famous athletes.

13:45Yeah. How did you get there? You're a guy showing up with a kind of terrifying looking piece of tech. How are you getting people at the top of their game to take a chance on you? Yeah. Well, that didn't happen overnight, for sure. Clearly. Like from 2008 to 2016, I made five different versions over that time period, just iterating and changing and tweaking. And I'd get it into therapists' hands and I'd get feedback from them and I'd take that and I'd do something different. And the goal all along was I wanted to be able to give it to someone and have them have an experience without me. because a lot of what I realized was me plus the gun provided this experience and they were associating me with that experience and I wanted people to recognize you can do this on your own like this isn't that's why that's how I discovered it was I do it on myself I wasn't having someone else treat me that sort of helped me understand like okay how can I get this into the hands of people that know how to use it and help me talk about it so I was with my cousin in Norway just last week and we were talking about this.

14:53I realized there was this pattern that I went through and it was one-to-one a lot. It was me with an athlete, me with a physio, me with a trainer, me with someone. And it was this really intense, like, you know, what is this? And tell me what this is. And then it became one-to-many. So suddenly now I'm standing in front of a group of therapists or a group of athletes, or then it slowly became many-to-many. So now we have trainers in Rome and Serbia. And like, I could give you all the different places. They have people out there doing that. So it was my goal to get one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many.

15:32And in order to do that, I've got to get this in the hands of people that can use it. Rinaldo. So who's the most famous person in the world? Rinaldo. Okay, well, we ended up getting Rinaldo, but it didn't happen overnight. It's because we had the right tech with the right science, with the right protocols to get me into these spaces that are vetted. You don't get to walk into Real Madrid's training room if you're not legit. So by that time, I'd had all the science, enough. Then I had enough of the product, the pricing was right. And that was the very early days with our G1. So it was a journey.

16:08The 10 ,000 hour rule for sure did the 10 ,000 hour rule. I treated everyone everywhere as much as I could and gathered as much information about what it was doing to the body to validate some of the claims that I was making. And then, you know, we sort of kept developing from there. You can't replace the value of that one-to-one connection and that one-to-one feedback, especially in the early days. You were also the first entrant into a category that previously had not existed, which means there's a ton of white space, right? There's a ton of opportunity there to exploit. But it also means that, like, you have to do a lot of convincing of people.

16:50And it's bound to have its tractors, right? Like, what were some moments in the early days where you felt like, oof, I might be pushing into territory that people aren't really comfortable with yet? I was at the UCLA track working with some Paralympians for the Brazil Olympics. And the U.S. track team was there. and a couple of the U.S. track players would come over to my table. I'd start treating them. Their coach came over and said, what are you doing? What is that? And I sort of described it to him, and he said, yeah, I don't want my people over here. I don't want my – don't treat any of our athletes.

17:28And I was like, what? I just couldn't understand. Like, what are you talking about? I'm working on – yeah, but those – they need it. The Paralympians need it. There's a Blake, a guy who has a double amputee. He doesn't have lower legs, and he sprints on his prosthetics. So I'm working on him. And he's like, yeah, you can work on those guys, but don't work on my athletes. Those moments were tough because I'm like, what are they not seeing? You know, I just got, I was at Indian Wells this weekend and I was walking around the grounds. I was having this memory of working with an athlete and we were in the training room and the training room was like a big room and it was separated by curtains.

18:06So it wasn't walls, super quiet. And you could hear people whispering and tennis is a really interesting space. when it comes to that kind of stuff. Like they don't want anyone seeing what's going on. You know, the curtain's shut. And if someone's working on their knee or their elbow or their shoulder or their back, whatever, they don't want anyone seeing that. So I shut the curtain and I grabbed my two Theraguns and I turned them on in this room. And it was like, I was jackhammering cement. It was like, da-da-da-da-da. This guy came over and said, what, ripped the curtain open. He said, what are you doing?

18:33And I was standing there with my two Theraguns. He goes, you can't do that in here. You got to go outside. So I'm like standing there trying to talk to this athlete. I'm like, well, can you come outside? and I'll put my table out there. So we had to go out in the parking lot, put my table up, treat them out in the parking lot. Oh my God. I know. The road to success. Yeah. 2016 is when Theragun first makes its way to the consumer market. It's also when your still current CEO, Ben Nazarian, joined, right? As CEO. This was your baby. As you've just told us, you had already spent years developing this thing, blood, sweat, and tears.

19:14How did you know that he was the guy to trust? Through experience. I had three business partners before him and they'd all kind of hosed me. The first one was a friend and he ended up not doing what he said he was doing. And I found that out. And so I had to buy the company from him. And then I went and found another, my brother and another person. And I realized that other person was screwing me, for lack of a better term, with shipping costs, getting Theraguns from China to the US. I approached her about that and ended up being not a good situation. And so I had to buy my company back from them.

19:55And then I got in halfway in with a couple of NFL players. And, you know, I feel like Theragun had angels that would watch over me. That sounds funny. but I really felt there's this divine sort of like guidance. And I, something about that situation just didn't feel right. And then through just a really weird coincidence, I meet someone who was working for Ben at the time and I went and saw him. And when he walked in his conference room, I, I, I knew him. It was like, it was like a cousin or something. It was so weird. and he sat down and the more we talked, the more we just immediately got along.

20:35And I realized the reason when you said like, why was he the one? He was saying all the right things and he knew, he already kind of knew what to ask. And he was, my experience had told me, oh, wow, this is what it looks like. Not those things, but this is what it looks like. And we did a handshake deal. Honestly, we didn't sign any documents until three months later, it was March. Actually, it's our anniversary this month. Happy anniversary. Thank you. It was that, you know? And we're so different. We see the world through these such different lenses, but we knew that we both had the same goal.

21:13It was fuel to the fire. It made so many things just ignited from that, from product development to marketing. And we finally had someone come in and manage the money and just real things to make it a business. You asked me a minute ago when I knew it was a business. That's when I knew it was a business. It wasn't until then. When he joined. When he joined. And I was like, oh, wow, I think this could be big. He came in and was able to give it some operational rigor that sounds like maybe it was lacking fire. You know, we sat down in a room and he was like, tell me about this thing. What is it doing?

21:45And so we really designed, I'm doing this because we actually wrote on a wall in his office. They have those dry waste walls in his office. And we just wrote all the way around this wall. And that's just that whole experience. I realized like, oh, wow, he knows how to build a business. You know, I'm a chiropractor. I know how to build a practice and how to help people. But like to scale something like that, that was, yeah, that was magic. I think it requires the ability to also not let your ego get in the way to be able to recognize as a founder, hey, maybe I'm not the right person for the CEO role.

22:18Was there ever any part of you that thought maybe that was the hat you should be wearing? No, not for a minute. That's what made it so easy for both of us. I don't want to be CEO. That's not my specialty. You're that. Like, that's so much easier. So no, it wasn't ego. And I think people that have heard of Ben or know Ben's name or where he comes from, they may think there's some arrogance to him, but there's not. He's never been that way with me, ever. I never took that from him. I don't feel like he got that from me either. We've had heated debates, trust me. Like, we go at each other like brothers sometimes.

22:54But it's always like, I love you. I love you too. Like, let's make this happen. What can we do? Well, a good relationship isn't the absence of conflict, right? It's like knowing how to move through conflict well. Yeah. A good co-founder relationship, I was just talking about this with another guest, like a good co-founder relationship is like a good marriage. Yeah. Do you have any advice for other founders out there in terms of finding somebody who's going to be the right fit to the puzzle? My mom used to come and sit in my cars when I'd buy a new car. She'd get in the passenger seat. and she'd know right away.

23:28So I'd drive my car up to my mom's, get in the cab, pass it. Then she'd sit down and say, yep, this is the car. Or she'd say, nope, it's not the car. I think there's a feeling, there's something that happens. And if you ignore that, you're going to run into problems. And so I think listening to other people's opinions about this person, good or bad, is not good. You need to balance that out with who this person is, where they're coming from, but people can ignite things. They can come in and be like, what if he's doing this? And what if they do that? And Ben and I talk about it. He's given me a lot of autonomy before private equity and stuff came in.

24:07He just kind of let me do whatever. When I say let me, I mean, he'd just kind of go out and build the brand, do whatever you want to do. And some of the comments he would hear is, you're letting him do that as a founder? Are you afraid he's going to cut you out or something? And that was never the deal. That's not how it is. So I think my advice would be, you need to know the person. You said a second ago, it's like a marriage. You really need to know the person. When it comes right down to it, what are they going to choose? Like, what are they going to do in a situation? Do they have character?

24:40Can they tell the truth? Are they avoidant? There's a lot of little things that are going to matter. And most of the stuff doesn't, to be honest. But it's those moments that really matter, where you're sitting in front of a manufacturer, and you've got to be really clear with them about something. And you don't want someone scooting around the issue or whatever. You want someone that can come in and tell them and then have characters stick to that until they see it through the end. And those are things I saw in him that really made a big difference. The character pieces. Yeah. Not just the tactical expertise.

25:14No, because I think you can find people that are like that. And I think you can find money. To be honest, money is not hard to find. And so it isn't, I don't think. People are going to line up to give you money if you have a great idea. I know that from experience. So it was finding the right person, the person that knew what we were trying to do as a brand, that had the same traits and characteristics that I did. That's really where we melted together, Ben and I, closely. We had a no-asshole policy. There's no backstabbing. There's no talking about this or that. and and we he and I are really clear about being super honest with each other so that those are just little things you know it's like a marriage it's like a marriage yeah Theragun today which you know now has expanded into Therabody is your company right because you've expanded your product line which I want to talk about but Theragun has become so ubiquitous it's almost like Kleenex it's like now it has spawned you know a thousand competitors out there and it feels like no matter what percussive instrument you're using on your body, people are calling it a Theragun.